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Appendix B
Human Nature,
Evolution, and Ethics
More than two millennia ago, Aristotle suggested that
human beings shared a common nature—an idea that is
now the focus of intense study and controversy. Aristotle is
known, of course, as a pioneering philosopher, ethicist, and
political thinker, but he was also the first important biolo-
gist and zoologist in the West, and his famous definition of
human beings draws on his scientific background. What he
said, with the power of simplicity, is that human beings are
political or social animals.
1
The usual practice for philosophers, sociologists, and
other thinkers is to focus on the political and social aspects
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of human nature, but Aristotle also emphasized that human
beings are animals. In other words, we are creatures and, like
other creatures, we have certain built-in traits and tendencies.
These aren’t like software code—they don’t program us and
determine what we think and do. Instead they incline us or
spring-load us to think, feel, and act in certain ways. To a
significant degree, they make us what we are.
This way of thinking makes some people uncomfortable,
because it seems to reduce human beings to mere animals and
ignores our intellectual, artistic, social, technological, and spir-
itual achievements. But that is hardly the case. The argument
is not that evolution and genetics shape all or most of what we
do or that our instincts and drives are fundamentally animal-
istic. Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic theologian, wrote,
“We do not merely have, but are our bodies.” Aquinas also
wrote, “Since the soul is part of the body of a human being,
the soul is not the whole human being and my soul is not I.”
2
If some version of Aristotle’s view is correct, it may help
explain why certain ways of thinking about hard problems
have engaged the best minds and hearts, in so many different
cultures and eras, and why our everyday thinking about hard
decisions also reflects these perspectives. The reason is that
certain ways of grappling with hard problems strengthen the
cooperative tendencies that helped the human species survive
and help overcome other innate tendencies that reduce the
chance of survival.
Should we accept Aristotle’s view? His stature, as one of
the most important thinkers in the Western tradition, means
we should take his ideas seriously, but we shouldn’t accept an
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idea simply because Aristotle—or, for that matter, any import-
ant thinker—happens to assert it. And, if we look beyond
Aristotle’s thinking, we find strong support for the idea of a
common human nature in contemporary evolutionary theory.
Evolutionary theory asks what capabilities, traits, and
tendencies would have helped human creatures or our pre-
human ancestors survive the rigors of natural selection.
Creatures that shared these traits would have been more
likely to survive, reproduce, and evolve into us. Evolutionary
science today draws on psychology, biology, genetics, anthro-
pology, and other disciplines to sketch plausible pictures of
social practices and ways of thinking and acting that might
have enabled our distant ancestors to survive and evolve in
our direction.
The broad argument is that the early humans and prehu-
mans who survived and evolved into us did so because they
had inclinations to cooperate with each other. The groups
with more “cooperators” were more likely to survive—
because their members could work together to solve the basic
problems of survival—protecting their young, finding and
storing food, fending off predators, winning battles against
other human groups. Our common human nature—as social
animals—reflects the traits or premoral instincts that help
our distant ancestors meet and surmount common human
challenges.
The view that human beings may have some innate coop-
erative instincts runs counter to the classic, reductionist views
of evolution. It describes natural selection as, in essence,
an endless process of remorseless struggle that pits every
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creature against every creature. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s
famous phrase—“nature red in tooth and claw”—summarizes
this way of thinking about evolution.
If there is some common human nature, what is it? What
form does it take? Here, once again, evolutionary theory—
as well as many philosophical and religious traditions, along
with psychological theory—point toward the same broad
answer. The basic idea is that the human creature is flawed,
divided, and torn. We are pulled back and forth between
benevolent, altruistic, and admirable impulses and aggres-
sive, vicious, predatory ones. This theme is a bright thread
that runs vividly, not just through evolutionary theory and
religious traditions, but also through great literature, serious
historical works, the close observation of everyday life, and
personal introspection.
What does this have to do with ethics? During the last
two decades, scholars and scientists from a wide range of
disciplines have been focused intensely on understand-
ing the relationship between human nature—to the extent
there is a common human nature—and human evolution.
Others have focused more sharply and tried to discern rela-
tionships between evolution, as it is now understood, and the
widespread, almost universal practice of developing ethical
norms. An emerging answer is that a cooperative, perhaps
partially altruistic disposition—which ethical theory artic-
ulates in various ways—helped to express and channel our
narrowly self-interested and predatory instincts and enabled
the human species to survive and reproduce successfully.
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The foregoing account of the relationship between evolu-
tion and human nature draws on the following works:
Boehm, Christopher. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue,
Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
Flack, J. C., and Frans B. M. de Waal. “Any Animal
Whatever: Darwinian Building Blocks of Morality in
Monkeys and Apes.” In Evolutionary Origin of Morality:
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, edited by Leonard D. Katz,
1–29. Bowling Green, OH: Imprint Academic, 2002.
Kitcher, Philip. The Ethical Project. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011.
Krygier, Martin. Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Kupperman, Joel. Theories of Human Nature. Cambridge,
MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2010.
MacIntyre, Alisdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human
Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court Press, 1999.
Pinker, Stephen. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of
Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Stevenson, Leslie, and David L. Haberman. Ten Theories
of Human Nature, chapter 11. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
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